Look: All of baseball thought it was a good idea for you to come back. OK, that's not totally true. People were worried. Skeptical. Maybe that knee injury last spring was a sign. Maybe your body had finally quit. Maybe it really was time to go. Nobody would have been upset with you had you walked away then. It had already been a spectacular career. All-time, in fact. Hall of Fame. The best there ever was. All that snazzy stuff.

But you had to come back. Of course. That's Mariano. You weren't about to leave the game you loved, the only team you'd known, getting carried off a warning track. You are a prideful man. "Write it down in big letters," you said at the time, "I'm not going out like this."

Not going to lie: We wrote it down in small letters. It was an ACL, Mo. That's a long road back for anyone. Real life isn't Rocky III. Pride wasn't going to cut it. There would be a long rehab. A lot of frustration. If you got halfway into it and decided to bag it, everyone would have understood. Rehab stinks.

Instead, here you are. Back, at 43. Putting an exclamation point on greatness. Having a pinnacle season. Seventeen saves in 17 opportunities. You lead the major leagues. Your strikeouts are solid. Walks are low. The ERA and WHIP? Bird feed. The best there ever was is back to being the best there is.

This is not the usual narrative. Traditionally the athlete is the last to see the end. It's the saddest sight in sports. OK, that's not true. The saddest sight in sports: the Mets when Matt Harvey isn't pitching. But the second saddest sight in sports is the great athlete who doesn't know his or her career is over. Who needs one last pitch or swing or shot and can't acknowledge that the time has come. Sports history is full of examples of players playing past their expiration date. That's, like, a third of the Knicks' roster.

The end was going to call on you, too, Mariano. Before you could see it. Maybe you'd have a couple of good days but soon there would be bad days and after a while the bad days would outnumber the good ones. The momentum would accelerate and pretty soon age would tackle you to the ground. There would be pronouncements of your decline and denials of your decline and eventually acceptance of your decline. There would be no embarrassment: You've done too much for the Yankees. You're old enough to name everybody on "Three's Company." You're a geezer. Downhill is how these things go.

It's not going that way. You're back to yourself. Old Mo is like New Mo. You're the worst geezer ever. All of us complaining about stiff knees and morning aches and why we can't play Nerf basketball like we used to—you're putting us to shame.

But that's the thing about your career: the consistency. The approach is the same, the motion is the same, the results are the same. There's a certain Zen-like quality to it, the elegant precision, the 1-2-3 nights, the predictable results. Now you're painting a walk-off to end walk-offs. Rival players and managers are being asked to say nice things about you, about your impact on the game. So they say nice things about you and your impact on the game. And then you close them out three hours later.

It's not nice, Mariano. It's not nice at all.

You're not even retiring the right way. Retirement is supposed to be a celebration of you, Mariano. It's time for rocking chairs and cheesy Jumbotron tributes in hostile parks. Baseball wants to thank you. Instead, you're thanking baseball. As the Journal's Dan Barbarisi wrote, whenever the Yankees are on the road, you're quietly meeting with fans and ballpark employees—people who may have booed you in the past—and thanking them for their contributions to the game you love.

You don't want it to be about you. You're making it about us. You're doing this completely wrong.

Just so you know, there's still time to change. If you want to start eating pizza for breakfast and stay up too late watching HBO and let yourself go a bit—it's totally OK. Everyone will be cool. You can't be perfect forever.

Somehow we doubt you're going to take this advice. You're Mariano Rivera.

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